11 December 1998

Hearing sceptic harmonies

• 11 December 1998

The Eurosceptics are right: the aim of the EU is, and has always been, towards ever closer economic and political union. Where they are wrong is in believing that it ...

7 Days

• 11 December 1998

Straw decides Jack Straw finally brought to an end weeks of nail-biting drama over the fate of General Augusto Pinochet of Chile. "The UK's obligation," the Home Secretary said on ...

The Journal of Lynton Charles, Deputy Minister without Portfolio

• 11 December 1998

Sunday I awake, sweating, from a dream in which I am on holiday in some beach paradise with Zero Anstiss. We are sitting on the veranda late one evening, sipping ...

Mandelson: can he learn to be boring?

• Steve Richards
• 11 December 1998

Since the election, Peter Mandelson has metamorphosed from a "person in the dark" to the most photographed and talked-about minister in the cabinet. The light shines upon him with the ...

Pinochet, like Stalin and Franco but unlike Hitler, really liked killing his own people

• Carmen Callil
• 11 December 1998

For most of the past decade I've spent much of my time in south-west France. This month I upped sticks and returned to London for good. I felt pretty hesitant ...

Peace crawls through a moral swamp

• John Lloyd
• 11 December 1998

John Lloyd reveals that, despite the Good Friday Agreement, violence is rising in Ulster as the paramilitary gangs continue to beat, murder and torture

Andrew Kearney was out drinking one night in July when he got into a quarrel over a game of cards. He suspected someone of cheating. He called the man outside ...

Just because the idea of cloning provokes outrage doesn't mean it should be banned

• Mary Riddell
• 11 December 1998

We like our Christmas miracles simple. First along was Zoe McDougall, born weighing 15 ounces and now home from hospital. Second in line was the recommendation that research into human ...

How William failed the virility test

• Simon Heffer
• 11 December 1998

Hague is trying to look like a prime minister, when he should concentrate on being leader of the opposition. Simon Hefferoffers advice

Before we come on to the question of how William Hague best goes about trying to improve his disastrous leadership of the Conservative Party, one important point needs to be ...

Instant Expert's Kit - Oskar Lafontaine

• Duncan Parrish
• 11 December 1998

Isn't he "The Most Dangerous Man In Europe"?

So we're reliably informed by the Sun. Germany's new finance minister, swept to power with the SPD chancellor Gerhard Schroder in October, ...

Plato rules, OK?

• Alain de Botton
• 11 December 1998

Alain de Bottonargues that, in our self-help age, the ancient philosophers are inevitably more popular than Derrida, Baudrillard and the deconstructionists

From a distance, few areas of knowledge seem more enticing or more profound than philosophy. In a secular age, philosophy can look like the ultimate authority on life's great questions, ...

Is Britain as racist as 50 years ago? I say: surely not!

• Darcus Howe
• 11 December 1998

Readers of this column know that I chaired a public debate on Channel 4 following a Dispatches programme which reported gang rapes perpetrated by black juveniles on their female contemporaries ...

Dawn raids: a guide to the etiquette

• Gillian Linscott
• 11 December 1998

They've come to take your husband away. How should you treat them, asks Gillian Linscott

Dear Ms Manners: Before dawn last Thursday our cottage was raided by Ministry of Defence police. Six plainclothes officers arrested my husband under the Official Secrets Act and spent the ...

Please trust the workers, Mr Dobson

• Andrew Cooper
• 11 December 1998

The new mental health policies rely too much on dirigiste managers, argues Andrew Cooper

There is a seeming contradiction at the heart of Frank Dobson's Commons statement to launch the government's new mental health strategy, which involves more beds, better access to new drugs, ...

When the Olympics comes to Sydney, it will provide a facade for a shameful Australia

• John Pilger
• 11 December 1998

Sydney

Sydney is one of the world's most desirable cities. I grew up here and I keep coming back to my former home at Bondi, with its cocktail of salt ...

The New Statesman Interview - Alun Michael

• Steve Richards
• 11 December 1998

He has just made it to the cabinet, yet now he faces political oblivion . . . unless he can show how very Welsh he is

Alun Michael is Welsh. Have you got that? He is Welsh to the ends of his fingertips. As Welsh as Donald Dewar is Scottish. In his battle to succeed Ron ...

Will Castro be next in the dock?

• Maurice Walsh
• 11 December 1998

Cuba's dictator is just as bad as Pinochet, argues the right. Maurice Walshweighs the evidence

If Pinochet gets away with it, can we look forward to the possibility of more cases being brought against foreign dictators? If nothing else, the Law Lords have set a ...

Why sucking up to China has failed

• Jonathan Mirsky
• 11 December 1998

Our leaders just express dismay while they keep stamping on human rights. Jonathan Mirskyreports

Tony Blair and Robin Cook keep bragging about their subtle manoeuvrings with Beijing over human rights - yet the number of Chinese dissidents being arrested increases. Set against this grim ...

Blair can learn from Stephen Fry

• Donald Hirsch
• 11 December 1998

Governments usually become old and cynical. Donald Hirschhopes this one will be an exception

The last government deluged Britain with indicators telling us how well schools get our children through exams, how quickly hospitals get patients through waiting rooms, how many trains run on ...

Thinker's Corner

• 11 December 1998

Is Tax Competition Harmful? (European Policy Forum, 29 Pall Mall, London SW1Y 5LP, 0171-839 7565, £ 15). Presented as a contribution to the current debate about taxation in Europe, this ...

The New Statesman Essay - The myth of John Smith the loser

• Francis Beckett
• 11 December 1998

Francis Beckett argues that an unmodernised Labour could have won in 1997

If anyone still believes, with Marx, that individuals do not change history, they might care to imagine what would have happened if John Smith had lived. Some things would be ...

Blair should listen to the screamers

• Emily Green
• 11 December 1998

Emily Greenasks why the Food Standards Agency has been put on the back burner

Whatever happened to the Food Standards Agency? Eighteen months ago, styled as a sort of turbo-nanny, it was meant to allay any and every public anxiety about food. The Cabinet ...

Lying is bad, except when you must lie

• Andrew Stephen
• 11 December 1998

So, some readers thought I was going a little far a couple of weeks ago when I wondered whether America is leaning more and more towards a deeply unattractive authoritarianism. ...

This England

• 11 December 1998

A 40ft aluminium ladder, adorned with pink neon tubes, bolted to a listed church tower to form "a metaphorical stairway to heaven" should be removed, say councillors in Salisbury, Wiltshire. ...

I have eaten so much offal that I may be the one person who is due to die next year of mad cow disease

• Sean French
• 11 December 1998

Nobody has yet asked me to name my favourite book (or indeed anything else) of the year, and it's getting rather close to Christmas. But among the many benefits (for ...

Cooke's America is not the vibrant place I remember and love

• 11 December 1998

Given the avalanche of abuse that Quentin Letts received in daring to criticise Alistair Cooke (Letters, 27 November), I feel I ought to say a few words in his defence. ...

Towards international justice

• 11 December 1998

Geoffrey Robertson, in his otherwise sensible piece ("Pinochet: the press got it wrong", 4 December), is mistaken in endorsing the Law Lords' view that serving heads of state have absolute ...

Blind to the beauties of science

• 11 December 1998

Geoffrey Wheatcroft ("The rise of the philistines", 4 December) is right to deplore the lack of cultivation of our politicians. However, we must not forget that great damage has been ...

Marriage matters

• 11 December 1998

Someone had better quickly tell John Lloyd and Jack Straw, the Home Secretary, that a parent's marital status does indeed matter ("How the left hijacked the family", 27 November).

Research ...

Perverse attack on Hinduism

• 11 December 1998

To say, as John Elliott does, that India is held back by Hinduism is really the height of western perverseness ("Held back by Hindu gods?", 4 December).

If Hinduism were ...

Dickensian thinking

• 11 December 1998

While vacuuming the threadbare carpet in my dilapidated end terrace, it suddenly occurred to me how preposterous your editorial (4 December) had been, in saying that children brought up in ...

Pragmatic, not dogmatic

• 11 December 1998

George Cowley says it is dogmatic to say that God is not (Letters, 4 December). No more so than to say the same about Father Christmas or Mother Goose or ...

Undemocratic lists

• 11 December 1998

Denis MacShane ("Open lists will give us closed minds", 27 November) offers a convincing defence of closed lists, and one suspects that the "modern political parties" he advocates are modelled ...

Carrying a torch

• Richard Cook
• 11 December 1998

Sinatra had no monopoly on songs of love and loss. Richard Cook recalls the female singers who told it their way

Singers aren't what they used to be. Now they are Whitney Houston and Celine Dion, aggressive multimedia stars whose singing seems incidental to their marketing and merchandising. Back then, they ...

Sophistry of art

• Andrew Billen
• 11 December 1998

Television

And lo, on Sunday night there came from out of a cave a prophet. His first name was Waldemar. His second was the highest possible score in a game of ...

Earthly powers

• Colin Tudge
• 11 December 1998

Science

Our world is packed with living things, but is it right to suggest, as James Lovelock did in his "Gaia" hypo-thesis of 1979, that the earth as a whole should ...

Back to the future

• Jonathan Romney
• 11 December 1998

Film

Cinema, according to one notorious adage, is "truth at 24 frames a second". But what is cinema when it comes at 48 frames a second, projected in three dimensions on ...

A Grimm business

• David Jays
• 11 December 1998

Theatre

From the dressing-up box, actors clamber into a toy theatre, a satisfying Pollocks proscenium. "This is a story about a shoe," announces one. Others maintain it is a story about ...

Room with a view

• Andrew Brown
• 11 December 1998

Internet

In generous spirit I would like to spend this column praising another magazine, which can't quite be seen as a rival to the NS since it costs nothing at all. ...

Founding principles

• Bee Wilson
• 11 December 1998

Food

There are two kinds of socialists when it comes to food. The first are hedonists; the second are puritans. The first look forward to the day when the masses will ...

Happy hours

• Victoria Moore
• 11 December 1998

Drink

My friend Sarah and I go to the Voodoo Lounge in London's Leicester Square for a drink. Three hours later we are still here, and it has to be said ...

Does Mr Rusbridger lack bottom? Too early to tell

• Peter Wilby
• 11 December 1998

Media

This is the week when they are biting their nails and fiddling with their calculators in national newspaper offices. On Monday, the monthly ABC (Audit Bureau of Circulation) figures will ...

Bet you don't know why West Ham are called the Hammers

• Hunter Davies
• 11 December 1998

I've gone through life thinking West Ham were called the Hammers after the Ham part of their name. Seemed obvious. Now I know the truth. And a great deal other ...

The long road to oblivion. Ian Aitken on Simon Heffer's lucid and majestic tribute to the controversial genius of Enoch Powell

• Ian Aitken
• 11 December 1998

Like the Roman: The Life of Enoch Powell Simon Heffer Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1,024pp, £25

It tells you a lot about this majestic book, and also about its subject, that Enoch Powell leaves ministerial office on page 333, with 628 pages still to read. For ...

Prisons of desire

• George Walden
• 11 December 1998

Adultery and Other Diversions Tim Parks Secker & Warburg, 136pp, £12.99

"One admires those books," writes Tim Parks, "whose complexity of content and vision gets closest to the grain of experience." Hardly original, perhaps, yet the sentiment bears repeating. The grain ...

Blind vision

• Melanie McDonagh
• 11 December 1998

Fighting for Peace General Sir Michael Rose Harvill Press, 256pp, £18

There was shelling in Sarajevo as General Sir Michael Rose arrived to begin his stint a commander of the UNPROFOR forces in Bosnia in January 1994. It was the Bosnian ...

Stubborn isolation

• Sousa Jamba
• 11 December 1998

Last days in Cloud Cuckooland: Dispatches from White Africa Graham Boynton Random House International, 299pp, £16.99

Should Europeans recolonise Africa? As the world despairs at the continent's recurring woes - corruption, incompetence, ethnic strife, economic stagnation - and at the cynicism of Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe, ...

Mind games

• Edward Skidelsky
• 11 December 1998

The Emotional Brain Joseph Le Doux Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 384pp, £18.99

Joseph Le Doux is a practising neurologist, and this book is, to use the old Soviet expression, "fundamental science". Those seeking advice on how to get the better of office ...

Books of the century

• Elizabeth Young
• 11 December 1998

Elizabeth Young on the courage and daring of Hubert Selby

Mention Hubert Selby (now minus the "Junior") to any reasonably well-read person and they will say, "Yes - Last Exit to Brooklyn. Brilliant. Excellent. A classic!" They remember the film, ...

Competition - Win a bottle of champagne

• 11 December 1998

No 3556 Set by Leonora Casement

You were asked for recipes from a top chef for some of the simple meals that people today consider to be "cooking", like reheating ...

In Holland, Black Peter brings nasty presents as well

• Paul Barker
• 11 December 1998

The merry face of Zwart Piet - Black Peter - beams out at me from the counters of baker's shops throughout Amsterdam. A chocolate-coloured coon. Marzipan is all the way ...

The best way to keep the children quiet at Christmas is to sit on them

• Laurie Taylor
• 11 December 1998

For the whole of this month I've been carefully looking for opportunities to play around with small children. Only last week I spotted one darling little five-year-old girl crying her ...